“LEARNING SEEDS”: NEW EXHIBIT TELLS REMARKABLE STORY OF HOLOCAUST-ERA AGRICULTURAL TRAINING FARM

RICHMOND, VA - The Virginia Holocaust Museum announces a new exhibition opening on August 10 at 10-12:30 that depicts the story of Gross-Breesen, an agricultural training farm for Jewish youth that was established on the Germany/Poland border before the outbreak of World War II. “Gross Breesen,” says Steve Strauss “is as much about education as it is about survival.”

Mr. Strauss, an acclaimed photographer based in New York City who worked for years for the TV News Show 60 Minutes, was first drawn to the subject when he was shown an original photo album depicting Gross Breesen. “There was one black and white photograph of a barn interior with sunlight pouring through a lone window onto a triangular pillar of harvested grain,” he said. “When I was told where it was taken and what the purpose of the farm was, the idea for a mixed media exhibition immediately came to mind.”

Dr. Curt Bondy, a charismatic and brilliant educator, ran the 1930’s farm. Under Bondy’s tutelage, the young men and women were immersed in a program that balanced hard physical farm labor with lessons on Jewish life, German history and social philosophy. The stately aesthetics and the stability of farm life at Gross Breesen were a welcome respite for the group of 130 Jewish youth that had for years been prey to the escalating oppression of Nazism. Through his efforts, many of Gross-Breesen’s youth were able to immigrate safety to foreign countries with a need for workers skilled in the agricultural sciences.

“Learning Seeds” will focus on this first group of Gross Breeseners, the individuals who took Bondy’s teachings and what they learned on the farm out into the world. Their story is a remarkable one, as almost all became leaders in their new communities as farmers, social workers, renowned artists, writers, educators and captains of business. But underlying their success was a profound sense of gratitude for what Bondy and Gross Breesen provided them, and despite their travels taking them to all points on the globe, they continued to “stick together,” keeping in touch with letters and reunions to this very day.
The exhibition itself is a mix of original photos taken at Gross Breesen, documentary footage and NPR/WJFF interviews of deceased and living Gross Breesners. To this end, several of these surviving Gross Breeseners plus their families will be on hand for the exhibits opening, and will be available to the press for interviews.

Survivors will have to wait for increased aid
By Adi Schwartz

In a long overdue response, the Prime Minister’s Office announced yesterday that the government does not intend, for the time being, to carry out the recommendations of the public commission of inquiry on the aid for Holocaust survivors.

At a meeting held yesterday at the Prime Minister’s Office, meant to adopt a stance on the conclusions of the commission, it was decided that “the government will discuss the various possibilities for the implementation of the report” during the discussions for the 2009 state budget.

Responding to the government decision yesterday retired Justice Dalia Dorner, who headed the commission of inquiry told Haaretz that “this is terrible. This buries the report.”

“Initially I had said that they are being cruel to the survivors and they told me that this is too harsh a comment. Now this is blatant cruelty. After all, time is critical. These people need this money immediately. If not for this, what was the purpose of the commission? Why did we issue recommendations as quickly as possible?”

The government decision follows specific recommendations by the commission to immediately increase the reparations paid to survivors - retroactively, since January 1, 2008.

The commission ruled on June 22 that in no more than 30 days, the state must adjust the compensation paid to survivors in line with the law on survivors of Nazi persecution. This means that the payments should constitute 75 percent of the rate paid by the German government to survivors.

In practice, the proposal for a large segment of the survivors is an increase to the monthly payments from NIS 1,046 to NIS 1,875.

CLAIMS CONFERENCE OBTAINS GERMAN PAYMENTS FOR JEWISH SURVIVORS OF NAZI SIEGE OF LENINGRAD NOW LIVING IN WEST

July 21, 2008 — In an historic breakthrough, the Claims Conference has negotiated one-time payments from Germany for certain Jewish victims of the Nazi siege of Leningrad.

In recent negotiations, the German government has agreed to include these Jewish victims in the Claims Conference Hardship Fund, provided they meet the program’s other eligibility criteria. The program issues a one-time payment of ˆ2,556.

It is expected that this agreement will lead to the payment to thousands of Jewish victims of Nazism from the former Soviet Union now living in Israel, the United States, Germany and other Western countries. It is the first time that the persecution of Jews who lived through the 900-day siege of Leningrad has been recognized by Germany.

Because of the Claims Conference negotiations, certain Jewish persons who stayed in Leningrad at some time between September 1941 and January 1944 or fled from there during this period may receive a one-time Hardship Fund payment, if they meet the other requirements of the Hardship Fund.

History

As German forces advanced toward Leningrad in 1941, Jewish residents tried to move as close as possible to the center of the city. Those Jews who were unable to flee from the Nazis and stayed in territories that became occupied were tortured and shot. The largest massacre occurred in Pushkin, a suburb of Leningrad. The 800 Jews of Pushkin were led into the cellars of Yekaterininsky Palace. They were then shot in groups in the neighboring park.

In planning for the siege, Hitler had described Leningrad as a center of Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia. Before the war, approximately 300,000 Jews lived in Leningrad and the surrounding area. If the Germans had fully occupied the city, they would have all been killed.

The Germans surrounded Leningrad in September 1941. During the siege, the Nazis cut all water and power supplies while subjecting residents to constant air attacks and artillery bombardment. The population of about 3 million was left to starve and freeze to death. An estimated 1 million residents of the city died.

The Nazis disseminated anti-Semitic flyers throughout the city during the siege, telling residents that the Jews were responsible for their misery and that the Germans were going to liberate the country from the rule of Bolsheviks and Jews.

Hardship Fund

The Hardship Fund, established in 1980 after five years of Claims Conference negotiations, provides a one-time payment of ˆ2,556 to certain Jewish victims of Nazism from former Soviet bloc countries who emigrated to the West after 1969, which was the application deadline for the West German Indemnification Laws (BEG). West German compensation laws enacted from 1953 through 1965 excluded from eligibility victims of Nazi persecution resident in the Eastern Block countries and the Soviet Union.

West Germany created this fund only on the condition that the Claims Conference, rather than the government, administer applications and payments pursuant to German government guidelines.
Based on the original size of the fund, it was estimated that 80,000 Holocaust survivors would benefit from it. The collapse of Communism and subsequent Jewish emigration from Soviet bloc countries greatly increased the number of Jewish victims of Nazism eligible for payments.
To date, approximately 320,000 Jewish victims of Nazism have been approved under the Hardship Fund, with more than $850 million paid.
The Claims Conference continues to approve more than 5,000 applications each year for Hardship Fund payments.
Applicants should note that the full criteria for the Hardship Fund, including this change in criteria, can be found at www.claimscon.org or by contacting the Claims Conference offices in New York, Tel Aviv or Frankfurt. Please note that no second applications can be made to the Hardship Fund.

MARIASCHIN: Lithuania’s new Jewish concerns

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Lithuania, a NATO ally with a Jewish history in turn glorious and tragic, has once again become a cause for Jewish concern more than 60 years after the Holocaust.

A home to Jews for more than 1,000 years, Lithuania once cradled a renaissance of scholarship, religious thought and culture second to none in the Jewish world. Its capital, Vilnius - known as Vilna, in Yiddish - was called the “Jerusalem of the North.” The country was home to thousands of Jewish scholars, writers, rabbis, leading figures in science and medicine and internationally recognized educational and cultural institutions.

This exemplar of Jewish life was extinguished in less than four years, in a ferocious frenzy carried out by the Nazis and their collaborators, culminating in the death of more than 90 percent of its prewar population of more than 200,000, including many members of my mother’s extended family.

Today, the former Soviet republic enjoys full membership in the European Union (EU) and NATO, having been one of the first Central and Eastern European countries to join those prestigious institutions. Several American Jewish organizations supported Lithuania’s accession to these bodies, recognizing a historic moment in which to solidify democracy and rule of law on the full European Continent.

Step by step, Lithuanian Jewry has attempted to rebuild community life after its near destruction during the Holocaust, and its suppression under the Soviets. Indeed, in the years following independence in 1991, there were several important attempts by Lithuania to reconcile with the past, including establishment of a commission to investigate “crimes of the Nazi and Soviet regimes”; the transfer (after protracted negotiations) of hundreds of Torah scrolls to Jewish institutions abroad; and the introduction of public school texts, which included material about the Holocaust on Lithuanian soil.

Soon, Lithuania’s steady integration into the democratic West will reach a new plateau when Vilnius assumes the EU’s designation as the European Capital of Culture for 2009. But as the country prepares itself for the honor the EU will confer upon it next year, an alarming convergence of issues relating to the Jewish community and the country’s Holocaust-era past has posed serious questions about whether the EU designation is merited.

I presented these concerns directly to Prime Minister Gediminas Kirkilas at a recent meeting in New York. I, along with colleagues from other Jewish organizations, urged the prime minister and his government to pass legislation that will resolve the issue of restitution of Jewish communal property. Frustration over the slow pace on this issue is just one of the topics we discussed with Mr. Kirkilas.

Four problems, in particular, require immediate action:

(1) Rising anti-Semitism and xenophobia. Lithuania’s small remaining Jewish community has spoken out recently against the growing frequency of anti-Semitic and other hateful displays, such as a skinhead parade in central Vilnius on the country’s independence day, March 11. There was no immediate condemnation from any political leader against the march, some of whose participants shouted “Juden raus” (”Jews Out”) and other anti-Semitic taunts. The Conference of the Lithuanian Jewish Community, representing 25 organizations, also criticized the government for its attempt to include provisions in a new citizenship law, which would promote inequality based on ethnic origin.

(2) Investigations of Holocaust survivors. The state prosecutor has begun legal proceedings against Holocaust survivors Yitzhak Arad and Fania Brantovsky, both of whom stand accused of war crimes related to their activities as anti-Nazi partisans in World War II. It is believed that investigations of other former Jewish partisans are under way. Mr. Arad, an internationally respected Holocaust scholar and longtime director of Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, served on the international historical commission - appointed by Lithuania’s president - that documented the wartime atrocities of Lithuanian collaborators. The government’s actions against him now signal an attempt to turn history upside down by casting murderous collaborators as heroic victims.

(3) Property restitution. Lithuania has stalled for years on an agreement that would return or provide compensation for properties belonging to the Jewish community, while some of those assets have by now been privatized and Lithuanian Jewry still struggles to revive itself. Draft legislation on restitution has languished for years, with no sign it will soon be considered. Other governments in Central and Eastern Europe acted years ago to restitute properties seized from Jewish communities by the Nazi and communist regimes - with varying degrees of goodwill and effectiveness - but Lithuania has been idle on this front.

(4) The Snipiskes Cemetery. The possible desecration of the historic Jewish cemetery by the Soviet regime is now being perpetuated both by Lithuania’s post-communist government and Vilnius’ municipal authorities. In the 1950s, the communist authorities built a “sports palace” on the site, and some remains, including those of the legendary Jewish religious figure Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman (The Vilna Gaon) were reinterred. Experts maintain there are still remains on the site and urged efforts to determine the precise boundaries of the resting ground.

But following the land’s privatization and sale to developers, construction of luxury apartments on the cemetery grounds continued apace, despite a pledge last year by the Lithuanian president to end defilement of the sacred site. Recently, a belated effort to establish the cemetery boundaries has been announced. While this effort to identify the cemetery’s boundaries is welcome, it is a tragedy that this procedure was not introduced before construction began. The government should cease all construction until experts definitively determine where the remains lie.

The cumulative weight of these ongoing issues suggests, at best, the Lithuanian government’s pronounced indifference toward the most pressing concerns of its surviving Jewish community and, at worst, outright hostility. This is hardly the posture the United States and Europe should expect of a full-fledged member of the democratic family of nations, or that the EU should expect of the host country of its 2009 cultural capital.

Daniel S. Mariaschin is executive vice president of B’nai B’rith International. B’nai B’rith is a founding member of the World Jewish Restitution Organization.

Orlev threatens state probe if return of Shoah victims’ assets isn’t speeded up
By DAN IZENBERG

Knesset State Control Committee Chairman Zevulun Orlev warned on Monday that if the company established to locate and return assets belonging to the heirs of Holocaust victims did not speed up its work over the next month, he would call for a state commission of inquiry to investigate its conduct.

“I am considering allotting a certain amount of time for the company to get itself together and, if the situation does not improve, establishing a state commission of inquiry,” Orlev (NU/NRP) said at a highly emotional committee meeting.

Yishai Amrami, the director-general of the company, told the committee that although it had amassed assets worth NIS 752 million and so far confirmed 110 heirs who were entitled to NIS 105m. of those assets, only 10 heirs had received their money so far. The company has been operating for a year and four months.

Holocaust survivors demanded to know why a share of the unclaimed money had not been distributed to the roughly 250,000 survivors currently living in Israel.

The high emotions in the discussion were caused by the fact that the survivors are dying at a rate of 30-40 per month and many of them live in severe poverty. Their representatives and sympathetic MKs accused the company of “sitting” on its assets instead of distributing them to those who cannot wait.

The company’s lawyer, Nadav Ha’etzni, told the committee that the law that had established the company gave precedence to the rightful heirs over survivors as a whole. He added that the law called on the company to wait one full year from the time an asset was located before it could distribute its value among the survivors.

“We are talking about rightful owners,” said Ha’etzni. “These assets are not abandoned. Our first duty is to try to locate the heirs and transfer the money to them.”

Nevertheless, Amrami told the committee that the company had distributed NIS 100m. to the survivors over the past year.

Seventy-five percent of the money went to the 12,000 neediest survivors, according to criteria established by the company. Each survivor received NIS 6,000 directly to his or her bank account.

Another NIS 25,000 went to various projects commemorating the Holocaust.

But Holocaust survivor and MK Sarah Marom Shalev (Gil) said the company should have distributed more money and not only to the neediest of the survivors.

“Who is the money going to be left to?” she said. “Why do you have to establish criteria [and give only to the neediest] when you have millions at your disposal?”

Shmuel Halpert (UTJ) accused every institution involved in the location and distribution of the properties of “deliberately procrastinating. Everyone is trying to mark time, aware that each day more of the survivors will die.”

Meanwhile, company chairman Avraham Roth, who was involved with the return of properties belonging to Holocaust victims in Holland, said Israel behaved worse than any other country in returning these assets that don’t belong to them.

“We are talking about many survivors,” he said. “We don’t have the energy to fight any more. No other country has behaved as badly as the institutions in Israel. In Holland, they handed over everything. Here we have been unable to achieve this. The Dutch government and parliament were also attentive to our needs.”

Roth singled out Bank Leumi as being the worst offender. The company estimates that the bank controls NIS 500m. belonging to Holocaust victims and charges that it refuses to cooperate.

Bank Leumi called account worthless, but Holocaust victim’s sons to get NIS 400,000
By Anshel Pfeffer, Haaretz Correspondent

Michael Eisenbud was a 13-year-old schoolboy in Panevezys, Lithuania in 1936 when his father attended a Zionist doctors’ conference in Palestine and opened an account at the Anglo-Palestine Bank.

Dr. Chaim Ben Zion Eisenbud continued depositing funds into the account until World War II broke out. In 1941, after the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union and occupied Lithuania, Dr. Chaim Ben Zion Eisenbud was taken, together with 7,000 of his fellow Jews from Panevezys, outside the city and shot to death. His sons Michael and Eliezer escaped to the Soviet area and served in the Red Army.

In 1973 Eliezer Eisenbud immigrated to Israel and asked the bank by then Bank Leumi for the family’s account. Michael immigrated in 1979, and the brothers have been attempting to release the funds for three decades.

“The Bank Leumi officials were very polite,” says Michael. “They said the money was transferred to the Custodian General. There we were told that due to the lira’s devaluation the money was worth very little and wasn’t even worth issuing an inheritance order for.”

In 2005 the brothers appealed to the Knesset Inquiry Committee for the Location and Restitution of Assets of Holocaust Victims, chaired by MK Colette Avital. The committee passed the case on to the Company for Location and Restitution of Holocaust Victims Assets and in February the Eisnbuds received NIS 300,000 70 percent of the account’s value, according to the company.

“They said it was an advance but it’s not clear when we’ll get the rest,” Michael said. “In any case, at our age, I’m 85 it cannot make a difference to our lives. It’s a pity we didn’t have it when we first came and our economic situation was difficult.”

The Eisenbuds’ situation is good compared to that of thousands of other Holocaust heirs. Only 10 heirs have so far received money from the company, which began operating some 18 months ago. The company was set up to locate all assets bought or deposited in pre-WWII Palestine and transfer them to survivors and/or heirs of Holocaust victims.

On Monday the company’s executives updated the Knesset Control Committee of its activity. Until the end of June the company had located NIS 750 million worth of assets  lands, homes, bank accounts, stocks and bonds held by the Custodian General, the Jewish National Fund, banks especially Bank Leumi and the Israel Museum, which has more than 1,000 objets d’art that belonged to Holocaust victims.

The company is continuing in its attempts to retrieve and locate more property and other assets, reportedly worth hundreds of millions of shekels.

The company posted on its Internet site the names of 66,000 Holocaust victims with assets in Israel. By the end of June, a total of 6,604 applications for the recovery of assets had had been filed. Only 105 applications have been approved; assets have been disbursed in about 10
of these cases.

The company says the law mandates a one-year waiting period between the publication of the list of assets (the first was issued in June 2007) and the disbursement of funds, so that all potential can apply.

Several MKs and Holocaust representatives of survivors’ organizations castigated the company for dragging its feet and for not using the retrieved assets to assist elderly and needy survivors.

Company chair Avraham Roth accused the JNF, the Custodian General and banks of refusing to release the money in their possession, in violation of the law.

The Custodian General’s representative said the delay was due to a tender to appoint four accountants’ firms to determine the assets’ precise value. The JNF spokeswoman said the JNF had transferred all the real estate owned by Holocaust victims to the company.Bank Leumi said the company had given it a list of 1,200 accounts worth a total of NIS 130 million.

“We checked, name by name, in our archives and in other archives. Some [account owners] aren’t Holocaust victims, others live in enemy countries. We gave them a detailed list of every name about three weeks ago,” the bank’s spokesman said.

Celia Yewlow, 91, Holocaust survivor
By Sally A. Downey

Inquirer Staff Writer

Celia Peres Yewlow, 91, formerly of Northeast Philadelphia, a Holocaust survivor, died yesterday at Willow Lake, an assisted living residence in Willow Grove.
A native of Shvadis, Lithuania, Mrs. Yewlow married Yude Ibedas, a photographer, in 1937 and moved with him to Kovno, Lithuania.

By 1942 her husband, parents, two brothers and a sister had all been killed by occupying German troops. She thought she and her 3-year-old daughter, Rena, were going to be killed too, she later told Holocaust Museum researchers, when German soldiers forced them onto a truck with other women and children from the Jewish ghetto in Kovno. For reasons she never understood, a soldier pulled her off the truck, forcing her to leave her daughter behind. Her daughter and the others were shot and buried in pits outside of the town.

Mrs. Yewlow was hidden by a Christian couple, Cheska and Jonas Balevicus, in a pig sty for the duration of the war at great risk to their family, which included two small children and a grandmother. After the war, Mrs. Yewlow married Sender Yewlow. For several years the couple lived in Italy, where their daughter was born. Following Jewish tradition to name a child after a deceased relative, they named her Batame, which means daughter of my people. “I was named for all the dead relatives,” the daughter, Batame Hertzbach said. “There was no one left.”

In 1949 the family moved to Philadelphia.

For the rest of her life Mrs. Yewlow was grateful to Cheska, whom she called her little sister, and Jonas Balevicus. She kept in contact with them and sent them packages, her daughter said.

Mrs. Yewlow shared her experience with her daughter and her grandchildren and returned to Kovna for the 50th anniversary of the liquidation of the Kovno Ghetto in 1995. She didn’t want her war experiences to be the focus of her life though, her daughter said, and preferred to have a positive outlook. She was a wonderful cook, her daughter said, and enjoyed reading and art and music.

In addition to her daughter, Mrs. Yewlow is survived by four grandchildren and two great grandchildren. Her husband died in 1991.

Reflect On This!: A selection of Sig Silber’s art including pastel and pen and ink

New Jersey artist, Siegmar Silber, will have an exhibit of his own work,including some of his favorite pastel and pen and ink drawings. The exhibition will be on display from

Wednesday, July 30th through Sunday, August 31st.
There will a reception held at The Paterson Museum
on Thursday, July 31st from 7pm to 9pm.

As an artist, Mr. Silber began working in pastels and pen and ink in his early fifties. He has studied art at the Montclair Art Museum under master pastelist Catherine Kinkade and is an alumnus of her master class. His work has been in numerous group shows with Ms. Kinkade and her students and has been juried into the Celebration of Lawyers in the Arts shows in 2003, 2005 and 2007. His art draws on recurrent themes from his childhood in England and includes numerous landscapes from the Lake District and the Berkshires in Massachusetts. During 2006, Mr. Silber had a one-man show entitled Simple Pleasures, featuring 24 of his works.

Silber says of his work, “My art provides a window into my life and my thinking - showing the imaginative, the inquisitive and the whimsical. Examining realities is the farthest from my mind when
drawing or painting, especially when working en plein air. Thus landscapes become abstracted and
impressionistic and drawings become unconsciously reflective of attitudes.”

Siegmar “Sig” Silber, Esq., is an attorney/artist. As an attorney, he practices in the intellectual property law firm of Silber & Fridman of Clifton, NJ, and has been in private practice since 1974. Mr. Silber came to the law after 11 years in various engineering and technical marketing positions. He is admitted to practice before the NJ Supreme Court, the US Patent and Trademark Office, and upper courts including the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

A longtime resident of Paterson, he was counsel to the Great Falls Development Corporation during a 10-year period that saw the restoration of the Rogers Locomotive Works and the relocation of the Paterson Museum. In the same period, he was an officer of and Counsel to the Inner City Ensemble, which introduced inner-city kids to the world of dance. Mr. Silber is a member of the New Jersey Volunteer Lawyers Association and is Counsel to the American Society of Botanical Artists.
The Paterson Museum is located on the corners of Market and Spruce Streets in the heart of the Great Falls/S.U.M Historic District.

The visiting hours are Tuesday-Friday 10:00 to 4:00 and Saturday and Sunday 12:30 to 4:30. A two-dollar donation for adults is appreciated. For information and directions call the Museum at 973-321-1260.

3GNY HAPPY HOUR…TO BENEFIT THE BLUE CARD

Wednesday, July 30, 2008, 7:30 - 9:30pm
Black Door, 127 W. 26th Street, New York, NY (between 6th & 7th Aves)
$5 Donation Suggested

*** All proceeds will go to The Blue Card. ***

The Blue Card was established by the Jewish community in Germany in
the early 1930s, to help Jews already being affected by Nazi
persecution through loss of jobs and other forms of oppression.

Today, most of the Holocaust survivors served by The Blue Card live at
or near the Federal poverty level. Many of these survivors never
received any restitutions or pensions, or did not qualify to receive
any of the other payments administered by The Claims Conference. Some
live on small Social Security payments and, though they may be insured
under Medicare, they are unable to pay for Medigap coverage and
prescription drugs. Those who qualify for Medicaid often need the care
of specialists or drugs not covered by Medicaid, and are frequently
desperate for uncovered services such as dental care.

It is impossible for Holocaust survivors to receive such basic
services and assistance without The Blue Card’s help.

For more info: www.bluecardfund.org/home.html

Non-Jewish Festival Director Receives Award for Preserving, Promoting Jewish Heritage

By Rukhl Schaechter

For ten days every summer, a neighborhood in Krakow–one of the oldest cities in Poland and a former capital–is transformed.

During that period, thousands of Poles, as well as visitors from other European countries, travel to the former Jewish quarter, Kazmierz, to attend dozens of workshops, exhibits and concerts highlighting the wide spectrum of Jewish music and the arts. For many Poles, this is the only exposure they have to a culture that once thrived in their country, before the Nazis decimated the Jewish population and the post-war Communist government repressed whatever remained.

This year’s festival, its eighteenth, took place from June 27th to July 6th and was sponsored by the city of Krakow, the Polish Ministry of Culture and Prime Minister’s Office, the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture, the Friends of the Cracow Jewish Culture Festival Society and the Sigmunt Rolat and Evens Foundations. Addressing the crowd at the opening concert, executive director of the festival, Janusz Makuch, especially welcomed the Jews of Krakow and Warsaw, declaring: “This festival would not have been possible without you, the Jewish community.”

In fact, a number of attendees noted the presence of more diverse Jewish organizations and artists this year — partly due to its theme, Israel’s 60th anniversary. As a result, in addition to the east European klezmer melodies echoing through the cobblestone-paved streets, the festival showcased a variety of Sephardi and Israeli musicians. Performers included the “Diva of Ladino”, Yasmin Levy, who has been nominated for the BBC Radio World Music Awards three times; David D’Or, an international opera star named Israel’s Singer of the Year in 2001, who now leads a band that blends North African and Turkish musical traditions, and the Israeli klezmer and Yiddish music group, “Oy Division.”

In order to give the non-Jewish participants a historical framework about the Jewish state, the festival offered a series of lectures by Israeli dignitaries, including one, where the former Israeli ambassador of Poland and Holocaust survivor, Shevach Weiss, spoke to the audience, in Polish, about the huge contribution the Polish Jews made to the establishment of the state of Israel and how much Israelis today appreciate Poland’s warm support.

The Israeli atmosphere was heightened throughout the week by a group of Druze Israelis who stood by a tent opposite the kosher Eden Hotel in traditional colorful garb, and sold freshly baked pita bread and coffee brewed in a finjan.

This was also the first time that Beit Warszawa, a Jewish cultural organization and the only liberal congregation in Warsaw, took part. Among the projects it organized was an exhibit of 19th century wood engravings of Jewish life by Polish artists, as well as a theatrical piece about the binding of Isaac, directed by the only female rabbi in Poland, Tanya Segal–a performance that one audience member called “very powerful.”

Magdalena Koralewska, the 25-year old president of Beit Warszawa, has been coming to the festival for many years, but said this was the first time she saw so many people from Jewish organizations attending, including representatives from “Paideia,” a Jewish studies program in Sweden, and from the Orthodox community of Warsaw. “It was a great chance to network and exchange ideas,” she said.

There were also daily classes in Yiddish and Hebrew language, Hasidic dance, Jewish cooking, calligraphy, paper cutting, and film screenings. Each night there were between one and three concerts — all to packed audiences.

“As usual, the programming all week was just amazing,” remarked leading klezmer and Yiddish musician Jeff Warschauer. “It was eclectic, from Yiddish to Mizrachi to avant-garde. And it’s all so professional, no kitch at all, like you might find at other Jewish concerts and festivals. Janusz’s standards are incredibly high.”

At Warschauer’s Yiddish singing workshop, about 60 people showed up, including locals from Krakow, Dutch, Swedes, Germans and Austrians. “They picked up the Yiddish accents really well,” he said. “But what was really surprising was that most of them were under 30.”

The culmination of the festival — the annual outdoor extravaganza of Jewish music, called “Shalom on Szeroka Street” — took place on Saturday night and was broadcast on Polish television. “About 14,000 people were there,” said Makuch. “The weather report had predicted rain, yet they came anyway. They just opened their umbrellas and listened to the music,” Makuch said.

Agnieszka Legutko, a 33-year old native of Krakow and presently a Yiddish instructor at Columbia University, led several tours, both very well-attended. After one of them, where she spoke about the leading rabbis of Krakow from the sixteenth century till the eve of World War II, a reporter from the Gazeta Wyborcza, the Polish equivalent of the New York Times, interviewed her for an article about the subject.

At another tour–of the former Krakow ghetto, this included Oskar Schindler’s factory– about 140 people showed up, including a young man with a shaved head, tattoos, and pierced nose, lips and eyebrows. “One of the visitors was a little concerned that he might be a skinhead, so I had one of my assistants keep an eye on him,” Legutko said. “But as it turned out, he was listening intently to everything I said, and looked genuinely interested. It made me believe that maybe the festival could really make dramatic changes in the bonds between our two nations.”

Makuch’s extraordinary work in organizing the festival has not gone unnoticed. Last month the Taube Foundation accorded him its annual Irena Sendlerowa Memorial Award — a new prize honoring exemplary contributions by contemporary Poles to the preservation and promotion of Jewish heritage in Poland. Irena Sendlerowa, who died May 12 in Warsaw at age 88, saved over 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto, and refused to divulge their identities, even after the Nazis captured and tortured her. Last year she was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

“Righteous gentiles like Irena laid the groundwork for what is happening in Poland,” Taube said. “This award is a fitting memorial for her trailblazing heroism, and few are more exemplary candidates than Janusz Makuch.”

Rukhl Schaechter is a staff writer and editor at the Forverts.